Lens

Since the Jerusalem Marathon was first run through the hilly streets of Israel’s capital in 2011, representatives of ALEH, which bills itself as the country’s “largest network of facilities for children with severe physical and cognitive disabilities,” have been a presence. As members of Team ALEH, supporters traveled the 26.2-mile course in distinctive bright green T-shirts to raise money and publicity for the organization, then with in a small group of ALEH (ALEH.org) residents who, with aid, “ran” an abbreviated course on race day.

Yonah Yesowitz, a senior at Union County Magnet High School in Springfield, N.J., said the just-completed nine-day Write On For Israel trip to the Jewish state left him “eager to get involved within the Jewish community and to advocate for my homeland on college campuses.”

One of the reasons that legendary Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, the epitome of Establishment society, decided to marry Lucinda Franks, a journalist and radical hippie almost 30 years his junior, four decades ago was seeing her take on a society woman who made disparaging remarks about Jews at an evening party when the couple was dating.

In 1941 the Nazis destroyed the headquarters of the YIVO Yiddish research institute in Vilna, Lithuania, ransacking the library and archives. Some material was sent to Frankfurt, Germany, to serve as the basis for the Third Reich’s Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question, and some was hidden in Vilna.

For more than two months near the end of World War II, several blocks in the Jewish area on Budapest, on the Pest side of the Danube, became a site of death and suffering. Surrounded by barbed wire and a stonewall, Budapest’s Jewish ghetto became the home of some 200,000 Jews, who died there of disease and starvation, or were shipped to Auschwitz from a nearby train platform.